Aleksandra Mir

Aleksandra Mir. Mary Boone Gallery / Printed Matter

Newsroom 1986-2000
15 September - 27 October 2007
Mary Boone Gallery, New York

A Retrospective of Printed Matter
21 September - 10 November 2007
Printed Matter, Inc, New York

In her essay “No time like the present,“ literary critic Deborah
Esch quotes another critic, Werner Hamacher, discussing a kind of
thought trial: “Many years ago…Max Horkheimer recommended a little
experiment during a television interview. He suggested reading
newspapers a few weeks or months after their publication. …The
reader of these old papers will notice that the imperatives,
attractions and threats heralded in them reveal themselves as such
only to the degree that they no longer directly affect him.” In
making Newsroom 1986-2000, 2007, Aleksandra Mir makes good
on Horkheimer’s hypothesis, and with it turned Mary Boone Gallery
into a studio-cum-press agency for six weeks.

Newsroom’s setup was simple, if extraordinarily laborious to
produce: Mir and her assistants ransacked the New York Public
Library, spending months copying ten thousand New York Daily
News and New York Post covers from the fifteen-year
period of the title, an interval that roughly coincides with that
of the artist’s residence in the city. Then, they set about
reproducing more than two hundred of the most banal, deplorable, or
just plain memorable front pages, churning out, as Mir put it in
her press release, “new art and old news” daily. Thus, those making
multiple visits to the show would have found a near-constantly
changing suite of large Sharpie-drawn reproductions with repeating
protagonists (celebrities, anonymous urban Everymen), sympathetic
groupings of content (riffs on food poisoning, murderous parents,
miracles, art theft), or typographical quirks (most frequently
ampersands, hyperbolic numbers, exclamation points, and dollar
signs).

While Mir’s overall project made ersatz history painting out of the
gossip-obsessed, disaster-splattered tabloids – inevitably
conjuring Andy Warhol’s painting of newspaper covers – it also made
clear that the city’s history was, in retrospect, decidedly more
farcical than tragic. Indeed, pre-9/11 New York returns as a
prelapsarian folly interrupt only by the most occasional
catastrophe. As Mir contends, it looks “like a quaint town full of
pretty crooks, with this accident or that occasional murder
resulting in the loss of a single life. A rape in Central Park and
a love triangle on Long Island were the two longest running news
stories of New York in the fifteen years leading up to the end of
the millennium.”

To wit: the obsessive coverage of Donald Trump’s protracted divorce
from Ivana Trump, affair with Marla Maples, divorce from Marla
Maple (IVANA TO DONALD AT SECRET SITDOWN: GIMME THE PLAZA! Finally
begets IVANA HAS LAST LAUGH) that overshadowed budget crisis and
the AIDS epidemic, to say nothing of national or international
politics. The prioritization of information manages to astonish, as
in a brief about Arab terrorist driving a bus off an Israeli cliff
beneath the trumpet GAY ALL IN THE FAMILY in 1989, or a minuscule
blurb on Nelson Mandela’s release from prison beneath an inane
larger banner the following year – selective emphases that seem
counterintuitive at best and laconically iniquitous at worst.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with her synchronous retrospective of
multiples, posters, invitation cards, and other publications and
ephemera at Printed Matter, Mir also published a reprise of a
radically different sort in her glib ethnology of the Southern
Californian art scene, LA: A Geography of Modern Art
(2007), a pamphlet based on Harold Rosenberg’s Tenth Street: A
geography of Modern Art (1959). Photographs by Justin Beal
detail such site-specificities as Dave Muller at mandrake Bar,
Pierre Huygue at the Mountain School of Arts, and crowds at an
opening, as well as shots of such local color as Trashy Lingerie’s
façade and a close-up of a decked-out WHO KILLED VERSACE? bag.
Alongside Mir’s captions – FOUNDING A COLONY, INDIVIDUAL PREVAIL
OVER THE GROUP, and LA STYLE SPANS THE ART WORLD – Beal’s images
conjure a mythologized place, not so much lost as preemptively
rendered nostalgic.

Taken together with Mir’s other work at Printed Matter, LA: A
Geography of Modern Art reads as equal part artist’s book,
Robinson Crusoe-esque fictional foray, and
photojournalistic narrative. But it was Mir’sKeep Abortion
Legal, 2005, a set of objects including a manicure kit, sewing
kit, dental floss, and lighter, that cut deepest there, resonating
with the debates and histories so summarily excised from the
headline record. Maybe it comes as little surprise that the cliché
is so often true: truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction, and
certainly sadder.